By Andrew Thompson

On Monday, Councilman Jack Kelly’s former chief of staff Chris Wright will face sentencing. Lest the fervor over Vince Fumo has made you forget, Wright was found guilty on corruption charges in late February after promising favorable legislation in exchange for free housing. Under the sentencing guidelines Wright faces around two-and-a-half years in jail. Fumo by the prosecutors’ standards should have received up to 27 years in jail instead of the just under five years he got.

The obvious question on everyone’s mind is will he get off easy?

In an apparently effort to ensure this doesn’t happen, in an earlier filing, Assistant US Attorney Michael Bresnick warned Judge Eduardo Roberno in relation to the Fumo sentence that “its worst legacy will arise if other judges follow that court’s mistaken lead, and use the Fumo sentence as a baseline for public corruption offenses.” Instead, Bresnick is arguing for six-and-a-half years in prison.

So will Fumo’s fate benefit Wright? Edward Ohlbaum, professor of trial advocacy at Temple University who chimed in on Radio Times (Mp3) after Fumo’s sentencing, doubts it. “My bet is that it will have no effect whatsoever. The Fumo sentence is an enigma and will have no bearing on anything else.” Ohlbaum also says trying to document any direct influence won’t be that easy. “We won’t know what effect that Fumo sentence has on the Wright sentencing because the judge will likely not allude to that. They rarely allude to their own prior sentences, let alone sentences from another case,” he told me.

There are also such stark contrasts between Wright’s case and Fumo’s - his ailing health, the notion that his scandal was a mere blemish on decades of public service that netted Philly a lot more than it would have gotten without him - that it’s tough to use it as a precedent for future
corruption sentences. Wright is small potatoes with little clout and he’s younger, so his “good deeds” resume is alot thinner than Fumo’s record. So, there’s not a lot to justify a slap on the wrist.

On the other hand, what if Wright gets tossed in jail for longer than Fumo? Would that be fair? Think about this scenario, one guy (Fumo) is convicted on 137 counts of corruption and swindling a charity of millions of dollars, the other (Wright) on only a few counts and committed crimes
involving far less money.

Has Judge Ronald Buckwalter made it difficult for all other judges in Philly to properly sentence corrupt officials?

Andrew Thompson is a freelance writer in Philadelphia. He is a frequent contributor to Philadelphia City Paper and writes the urban economics column Metronomics for Next American City.